Mills on Social Constructivist Approach to Race

2024-2 Social Ontology Segment 2

 

Q) Do you think that Mills’s social constructivist approach to race fares better or worse than Appiah’s skepticism? Briefly explain your thinking. 

Mills endorses a view of racial constructivism, according to which races are created through social history and intersubjectivity. This view denies that race is a metaphysical reality in the sense of being eternal, unchanging, necessary, or an inherent part of the universe. In this view, intersubjective agreement is fundamentally political.

I prefer to think of race as being socially constructed rather than as a non-existent entity. As Mills points out, the falsehood of racialism does not automatically exclude the possibility that race is still real in a different sense. Unlike the case of witchcraft, race appears more real in that it constitutes a significant part of one’s identity. I am reluctant to say that such an identity is merely fictitious.

 

Q) From Mills’s list of intuitive criteria that folks employ in their race-ascriptions, do you think that some criteria should carry more weight than others?

Mill suggests seven possible candidates for racial self- and other-identification: (1) bodily appearance, including certain apparent characteristics such as skin color, skull measurements, and hair texture; (2) ancestry, including one’s actual history; (3) self-awareness of ancestry; (4) public awareness of ancestry; (5) culture—which, on some accounts, constitutes the differences between races; (6) experience, which is often related to racial privilege and oppression within a particular racial system; and (7) subjective identification, characterized as how one sees oneself. I believe that experience should carry more weight than others, in the sense that criteria such as ancestry and subjective identification de facto function within the system of racial hierarchy. The one-drop rule, for instance, presupposes that some racial groups are more privileged and therefore must maintain their purity. Similarly, public awareness of ancestry can be interpreted as a kind of oppressive experience.